Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘kids’

Nice Pet, Just Don’t Squoosh It

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 7, 2013| Leave a Comment »

ImageLet me get right to the point: Elizabeth is attempting to domesticate a Stink Bug.

Scourge of the Mid-Atlantic for the past several years, invader of our screened porch and therefore our shiny new house last fall to the extent that we had to vacuum them up by the scores every day and to the extent that we couldn’t even use our screened porch or open the french doors connecting it to the house, a Stink Bug has now been captured and shanghaied INTO our house, upstairs and into her bedroom — on purpose.

It has been named, directly enough, “Stinky.”

Stinky has been inhabiting the plastic, cheapy terrarium shown in the photo for about a week now. I don’t know what the life expectancy of a Stink Bug is, but I am imagining his week in captivity will end up being a majority of it.

The girls have been feeding Stinky the usual Stink Bug stuff: organic lettuce, organic arugula, that sort of stuff.

At night, sometimes Stinky gets placed in the windowsill between the window and the screen…for fresh air.

I wondered how long this was going to go on, and then last night I heard Wife putting a kind and gentle end to the whole domestication of a Stink Bug issue. (No, she didn’t squoosh it.)

Girls, I think it’s not entirely fair to keep something that is meant to live outdoors penned up inside, so tomorrow, I’d like you to find a nice place out in the woods or yard to release Stinky.

OK, Mommy.

In other words: The girls are going to take Stinky outside, so that Stinky the Stink Bug can do what Stink bugs are meant to do. So Stinky will spend a little time outside, then spend the entire rest of his time and life exploring little cracks around our screened porch or waiting on the trim of the front door for us to open it for a split second, so that Stinky can get back into our house.

If Stinky is particularly successful, he may make it upstairs, to Elizabeth’s room, back to her windowsill or back into the plastic terrarium.

Who says you can’t go home again?

Read Full Post »

A Pink Ball’s Journey Across Virginia

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on March 11, 2013| Leave a Comment »

ImageWe’ve all heard those stories about a family that moved, and “accidentally left behind” the family cat. Days, weeks or months later, there is a scratching at the family’s door and, lo and behold, there stands the cat — its paws worn to a nub, having traveled (blank blank) miles out of pure devotion and unexplained animal instinct.

Well, that story has now gone Inanimate Plastic.

Yesterday, the girls were out exploring a stream at the edge of our neighborhood, and doing really cool kid things like building tiny rafts with sticks and lashing them together with bendable reeds and having raft floating contests. Right at the end of the road, the stream turns into a series of mini-waterfalls and pools, and in one of those pools was one of those el cheapo Chinese-made (I wonder what “El Cheapo” is in Mandarin) plastic/rubber balls.

“Hey!!!,” shouts Rosebud, “that’s just like the ball I got for my birthday in Norfolk. Just like it. That could be my ball.”

She sets off across slippery rock and muddy “island” and tries to get the ball. She can’t reach it and finally takes my suggestion to knock it loose with a stick. She picks up the mildew-ridden ball (see spots all over it on the photo) and hauls it out.

“This is definitely the ball I got on my birthday.”

Geography update: Norfolk to Roanoke? About 240 miles, and mostly uphill after it leaves the Coastal Plain region, crosses the Piedmont round about Charlottesville and then the Blue Ridge before heading south in the Shenandoah Valley.

Who says the Chinese don’t make quality crap?

So Rosebud and I head back to the house, where our efforts to wash up the mildewed lost pink birthday ball in the kitchen sink (hey, wife gets one of those big trendy “farm sinks,” and we don’t even farm, so…) are thwarted by Wife/Mommy, and we head down to the basement to the utility sink.

Mildew still won’t come up, but it is now CLEAN mildew.

Rosebud and I head outside to the driveway and conduct a great game of “roll and bounce the pink ball back and forth”, until Rosebud sees the neighbor and shouts her amazing luck to the neighbor.

“I found my pink ball from Norfolk.”

Well, how lucky, that’s your favorite color, too, neighbor shouts back.

“I’m going to keep it safe, in case it’s somebody else’s — and they call and want it back.”

I’m thinking about making some posters for local telephone poles: “Found. Mildewed Pink Ball.”

Read Full Post »

Now, I’m Dad Enough

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on December 31, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Sometimes, the modern Dad can be tempted to wonder if he is “Dad Enough.” Is he, or hey, am *I*, as much of a Dad as my Dad was or my wife’s Dad was or even, dare of all dares, their Dads were?

You know, you do tend to wonder these things as as you are sipping a Peppermint Mocha Latte that you just paid $5 for or as you are sitting in the car place asking them for their Wifi password while some other dude changes your oil.

And just then, along comes The Test. For me, that was Christmas Eve day when, at 10 a.m., I lugged a giant box into the walk-in closet that I share with Wife and pried it open. It was a dollhouse, ordered from a place called Kidcraft, made specifically to accommodate Barbies.

I have done this often enough to know that the scope of a job can be quickly calculated by the size of the screw pack that comes with the item. This one was a biggie. There was one size of screw that contained 28 pieces. The letters went from A through R. ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQR is a lot of different sizes of screw.

I pulled each piece of this monster out of the box and propped them around the room. I could tell then, that this was going to take a while. I hoped two hours would do it. I also decided something: “If I get this thing put together, if anybody asks, I am ALLOWED to say: Yes, that is the dollhouse that I BUILT for Rosebud.”

The directions sheet went EIGHT pages. Did you know that they don’t really write directions, in words, anymore? They just draw pictures and you have to figure out what the pictures mean and where the dotted lines indicate that the screws are supposed to go? Check out the first two pages in that photo. This is the SAT problem of all SAT problems.

By 1 p.m., three hours in, I decided to have a beer.

I called Wife in twice to make sure I had the proper interpretation — as she went to architecture school.

The dollhouse grew and grew until it was about as tall as my chest.

Finally, four hours and one Pale Ale later, it was done. “There it is,” I thought, “that’s the dollhouse I built for Rosebud.”

And I had two other thoughts:

Yeah, I’m Dad Enough.

And, this sucker is from Wife and I. If Santa wanted his name on this beast, he could’ve sent down a couple of elves.

Read Full Post »

New Dad-based Reality Show

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on March 9, 2010| 2 Comments »

Good morning, we’d like to take a few moments between “Arthur” and “Martha Speaks” to bring you the pilot edition of a new reality show: Five-Year-Old Eye for the Straight Guy.
As you can see, today’s episode was shot at an upscale urban mall, when an unsuspecting father of three girls took Daughter Two/Princess One to help him pick out a new shirt, add a little freshness to his wardrobe.
First stop, Banana Crew. I reach up and pull out a – I don’t know, some checked or striped typical man’s boring predictable shirt.
“Daddy, are you thinking of that for yourself?”
No, Sweetie, just straightening it out.
Back into another room. I pick up a cleverly horizonally striped jersey shirt.
“Oh, good,” Daughter Two/Princess One says. “Another JAIL shirt.”
(Every time I put on a previous purchase from Banana Crew, a Rugby shirt, she calls it the “Jail Shirt.”)
I put it back. D2/P1 says, “I don’t like your jail shirt. I said that so you wouldn’t buy another one.”
Got it.
Discouraged, yet highly amused, I told her we should try another store. We headed to J. Public.
There, I fingered a black shirt – the kind that seem to be everywhere now, a faux military style (like you wouldn’t get your butt whipped in one of these, even if your sleeves were rolled up in a cool fashion), black.
“I knew you’d like that,” D2/P1 said, deadpan and monotone, “you have a gray one EXACTLY like it.”
As the words “RUNAWAY, RUNAWAY!” rang in my head, we walked out. As we passed a table of shirts, I thought one would look good on my wife. Do you think this would be nice for Mommy?
D2/P1 nodded immediately. “Definitely.”
We got home, and days later Wife still had not tried it on. I knew then that D2/P1 had met her match.
“I’m just not sure,” Wife said, “about this color.”

Read Full Post »

But She Has an Excellent Caregiver

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on December 30, 2009| 2 Comments »

Look at her sitting there. Poor Molly McIntire.

Barely out of the American Girl box on Christmas morning when she was fated to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair.

Let me explain by backing up. Fontaine and Elizabeth asked for American Girl dolls for Christmas, and “Gram and Poppop” stepped forward to buy them each one.  Wife  and I then had to choose which doll for which girl, which meant I had to do something that only a strong, confident man can do: Form a staunch opinion on the advantages of “Ruthie” over “Molly,” or “Emily” vs. “Kit.”

(Hey, that’d be a fun March Madness style bracket: a tournament  of various American Girl dolls facing off against each other, until fourth-seeded “Julie Albright” crushes top-seed “Nicki Fleming” in an action-packed final at the Superdome.)

(Sorry.)

We picked Molly and Emily, after I took Ruthie down a notch by dubbing her too homely.

Backing up once more: For a couple of years now, when Fontaine draws a bunch of people, she always puts one of them in a wheelchair. I think it’s a tribute to her now late “Grandma G” who was in a wheelchair for some time. So Fontaine wanted not just a doll, but her first choice of accessory was a wheelchair.

She opened that gift about 15 minutes after Molly was first freed from her box. Fontaine immediately shoved her into the wheelchair, and she’s been in it ever since. She rode six hours from Pennsylvania to Virginia sitting in the wheelchair, sitting on Fontaine’s lap.

She does get a reprieve at night, when she is gingerly removed from the wheelchair and put to bed in Fontaine’s closet. But first thing in the morning, back in the chair she goes.

My only hope now is that the American Girl collection does not contain a “Handicap Van with Real Fold-Out Ramp.”

And that we don’t have to install a hydraulic lift on our stairs.

Read Full Post »

Gettin’ the Verbal Drop on You; A Better Idea

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on December 11, 2009| 1 Comment »

So Rosebud, she’s just two and a half. Third kid. Total rock by necessity, both physically and, uh, attitudinally.

She’s not big, but she’s massive in personality. She speaks like, I don’t know, a five-year-old, a six- or seven-year old? The point being, I had just read her three pre-bedtime (HINT HINT, CHICKIE!) books and was ready to put her into the crib, and she stiffened like a board and refused.

C’mon, it’s bedtime, let’s get you into the crib, said I, using the common parental plural “let’s” in an attempt to seem like a whole bunch of parents in order to get what I want. It’s time for sleep.

And here’s where it came in, a round-house uppercut from the right side that I just didn’t see coming.

“That’s your idea,” Rosebud said, “That’s not MY idea.”

What? I wasn’t sure I heard that. Then I suggested the bed thing again, and she came back again with that.

“That’s YOUR idea. That’s not MY idea.”

Oh man, what a rhetorical steel wall. Wouldn’t it be great to use that, say, at a corporate board meeting after listening to a really long, boring build up for a proposal?

Couldn’t you shut up somebody like even Rush Limbaugh, or wouldn’t you like to, with a, “That’s YOUR idea. That’s not MY idea.”?

Oh, the possibilities were running rampant in my mind when she interrupted me one more time.

“Daddy, what’s a IDEA?”

Read Full Post »

%d bloggers like this: